Trutap, a leading UK mobile startup which made the TechCrunch 40 list in 2007, is letting go almost 80% of its 30 staff after failing to hit its window for a second round of funding. A skeleton staff will keep the social apps Java application for mobiles available prior to a sale or new investment, only a month after its re-launch. The startup was orphaned after its first investor Tudor Ventures, a hedge fund hit hard by the economis crisis, put in a rumoured $6m but could not come back for a second funding round. And today the UK startup scene was also hit by news that review site Reevoo is putting a fifth of its staff jobs on an “at risk” list.

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When Crunchbase, our free database of startup and people information, released an API we started to observe some really interesting applications being built on it. But one of the most interesting could just be Crunchvision which puts on a map the startups indexed in Crunchbase. This service was created in a couple of days by Mapeed, a French startup which provides tools for creating and serving Google maps that include a high volume of data.

If Crunchvision was built on Google maps “manually” it would show an endless number of markers that would make the map unreadable. Mapeed is able to address this issue by grouping the markers and providing a clean result that remains accessible at decent speed. In CrunchVision for example you can zoom in and still have a clear impression on the startup density by region or city. This is not a surprise, but this is a great service to realize that Silicon Valley is no longer the only hot spot for startups, although it still remains No. 1 by far.

CrunchVision is still missing a few key features including a search engine or filters enabling the creation of ad-hoc maps (maps of startup that raised money, that provide financial services…). But this is a good starting point. Especially if you are an entrepreneur and want to know who operates in your neighborhood.

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We already knew The Huffington Post was looking for capital, but it turns out to be a little more than the $15 million the Times of London projected earlier. Kara Swisher says the political uber-blog network has in fact raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners and will announce the news later this morning (press release below).

This third round brings the total amount of funding raised to a whopping $37 million. When The HuffPo raised its $5 million Series B round in September last year, we wondered how much it was worth. Kara’s source indicates the valuation is ‘just south of $100 million’. Rafat Ali recently pegged a similar valuation.

The new capital will serve for recruitment as well as the expansion of The Huffington Post’s offerings into other areas like ‘business, green/clean-tech and investigative news’. They also leave the door open for ’select and focused acquisitions’. Oak Investment Partners has a relevant investment track record, having funded companies like Federated Media (TechCrunch’s advertising partner), Demand Media, MobiTV, Oberon Media and others in the past.

In an interview with BoomTown, Oak’s Fred Harman said:

There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be. And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.

Harman, who will be joining The HuffPo’s board, also added:

The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online. The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways … and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.

Comscore’s traffic report of the blogging network seems to reflect that The Huffington Post is in fact doing something right.

Update: here’s the full press release:

The Huffington Post Announces $25 Million In Funding From Oak Investment Partners

New York, NY (December 1, 2008)–The Huffington Post, a leading news and opinion site, today announced that it has secured $25 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The Huffington Post (”HuffPost”) will use the proceeds to invest in the growth of the company and for select and focused acquisitions. The company said it would invest in its technology and infrastructure, increase its in-house advertising capabilities, and continue to expand its content offerings–including a new investigative journalism initiative and a rollout of local versions of The Huffington Post in select cities. The announcement was made by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, co-founders of The Huffington Post.

“This commitment from Oak Investment Partners will allow us to accelerate our growth, with more verticals, more video, more citizen journalism initiatives, more cities for our local editions, and a fund for investigative journalism,” said Arianna Huffington. “We are particularly excited to have Fred Harman of Oak join our board; his deep knowledge of the new media landscape will help us to take HuffPost to the next level.”

Said Kenneth Lerer: “We are thrilled to bring on board a partner like Oak to work with Softbank Capital and Greycroft as we move forward. Since launching the site three and half years ago, the company has built a strong brand and an audience of millions who rely on the site for its mix of smart news and opinion. The additional capital from Oak will enable us to go full-steam ahead with operations and select acquisitions.”

Fred Harman, general partner at Oak Investment Partners, said, “Much of the news media business needs to be reassembled online around an ad-supported model and the timetable for this has been accelerated, not slowed, by this economic down cycle. We believe that The Huffington Post has built a platform and business model to be among the leaders in aggregating this audience online. Our financing will provide the resources necessary to scale the company, both organically as well as through acquisitions of additional talent and new media companies. We are also very excited to have the opportunity to back Arianna and the company’s strong entrepreneurial team.”

Betsy Morgan, CEO of The Huffington Post, said, “With funding from Oak, The Huffington Post is perfectly positioned to build on its incredible growth. Oak brings to the table a team with enormous experience and insight, and we look forward to working with them to seize the opportunities ahead of us.”

The Series C financing round comes as The Huffington Post continues to experience significant growth following the expansion of the site in 2007, when HuffPost began rolling out a variety of new sections, including entertainment, politics, media, living, style and green. The site also started its first local version, HuffPost Chicago. This year, The Huffington Post received widespread attention for its original reporting on the 2008 presidential race, including the coverage provided by its OffTheBus team of citizen journalists. HuffPost currently has 46 employees.

Harman joins The Huffington Post board of directors, whose members include: Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner of Softbank Capital, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Betsy Morgan.

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Next summer, you and all your so-called friends from Facebook and MySpace will be able to finally meet in a giant arena, where you ill be able to play dating games, compete against each other in Guitar Hero or Lacrosse, listen to live bands, or check out the modeling contest. The event will be called ArenaFest, and will eventually be held at 50 major sports arenas around the country. Next summer, it will start with 10 arenas in places like Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland, Phoenix, and Anaheim.

ArenaFest will have several draws, including live sports, live music, and live contests. John Ossenmacher, CEO of ArenaWorks Entertainment, which operates ArenaFest, calls it ” our version of live social networking.” People who go will be able to interact with their friends on Facebook and MySpace. And their friends on those social networks will be able to interact with what’s going on inside the arena.

The sport at the event will be lacrosse, which is one of the fastest-growing sports in the U.S. “We are basically building a brand new sports league targeted at this 16-to-24 year old demographic,” says Ossenmacher. But that’s not all.

Live bands, both signed and unsigned acts, will play onstage. For the unsigned bands, ArenaWorks is partnering with SellaBand, the site where music fans can fund unsigned bands. Since its launch in 2006, SellaBand has raised $3 million for musicians to record nearly 30 albums. Now bands on the site will have a chance to tour as well. They will be able to sign up to apply for the ArenaFest slots. If they gather 200 fans, $10,000 towards an album, or the most weekly votes, they get to proceed to Round 2 and play a local venue. The best of those will then be screened by a professional jury, which will determine who will play at ArenaFest.

At ArenaFest, the audience will be encouraged to participate themselves through a variety of contest stations, including a Lacrosse Challenge, Guitar Hero, Next Top Model (to lure the ladies), Dodgeball, and Break Dancing (yes, break dancing). There will also be some sort of dating game.

All of this will cost just $27.50 per ticket, and the whole thing will be repeated weekly throughout the summer at the same venues to encourage the high school and college crowd to keep coming back. “We are changing the whole philosophy of how the arena system works,” says Ossenmacher. Fill up the cheap seats in between games.

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There’s a new version of Songbeat, a simple but powerful desktop application for discovering music online, and I like it. When it was first released earlier this year, the client only enabled you to search for music online using Seeqpod, but the updated version lets you search more engines at once and also lets you easily play, export and download songs.

The music industry will be interested to know that the new iteration of Songbeat supports integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK ‘and more’. You can use the client to listen to music over the web, or listen and record straight from Last.fm. Music files can be directly exported to iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp or burnt on a CD, and you can download tracks or albums straight from the internet, or even a complete genre or artist thanks to integration with Mixtape. Songbeat even automatically tags your music files with lyrics and album cover art when you download them from the net.

The German company behind the Songbeat player offers the desktop app for free, so you can find and listen to as much music as you want, but you can only download 25 times. An upgrade would cost you 19.99 Euros (or $ 29.9), for which you’d get unlimited downloads.

Note that it only works on Windows XP and Vista for now. A Mac and iPhone version are under development, and should be ready by the end of the first quarter of next year.

And what about copyright infringement? Songbeat’s answer:

The downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand.

Oh, ok then.

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According to Hitwise, U.S. visit numbers across all tracked retail categories declined for Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday 2008, with the exception of online-only shopping websites. Among the top 500 Retail sites, Walmart was the top visited on Thanksgiving Day, but Amazon.com took over as top visited Retail site on Black Friday.

Overall, the numbers showed an expected but sharp decline: the percentage of U.S. visits was down 11% on Thanksgiving Day in 2008 compared to last year, and U.S. traffic on Black Friday was down 5%. But online-only (not brick-and-mortar) stores, of which there are 100 in the list of 500 top retail websites, had a pretty good run: the percentage of U.S visits to those shot up 11% on Thanksgiving Day, and went up 10% on Black Friday compared to 2007.

Still according to the Hitwise report, the top visited retail website on Thanksgiving Day was Walmart.com, receiving 13.72% of U.S. visits, while Amazon.com was the second most visited with 9.56% of visits. BestBuy.com came in third with 6.05%.

Amazon.com took over the lead on Black Friday, receiving 11.06% of U.S. visits among the top 500 retail websites. Walmart.com was the second most visited with 9.88% of visits followed by Target.com with 4.62%.

Update: Below is some more data from Coremetrics showing flattish activity at retail sites on Black Friday. Coremetrics tracks 300 retail Websites in detail, including shopping cart and order activity. Orders were completed in 3.5 percent of all sessions, about the same as last year, but the average order value ($126) was down 6.15 percent. Here are some of Coremetrics’ findings:

Chances are you use at least two major social networks - 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). Nearly 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. A lot of people maintain very different friend lists on LinkedIn than MySpace or Facebook. Etc. And when you add in niche social sites like YouTube, Flickr, etc., there’s even more overlap among users.

There has never been an effective way of aggregating and merging all the data and activity on these sites into a single user interface. A new venture backed Brazilian-based started called Power.com launches today, though, that aims to do just that. They’re calling what they do “social inter-networking” because it allows users to view and interact with all of their social networks at once. Data is aggregated, and the sites themselves, if accessed via the Power.com site, are marked up with added features in a way that Greasemonkey users are familiar with.

The service is unknown in the U.S. today, although it’s been live since August and boasts 5 million users already. Until today it supported just a few social networks, notably Orkut. Now, though, the service supports users from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5 and a number of niche networks like YouTube.

Here’s how it works.

Log into one or more social networks on the Power.com site. Friends, messages, updates, photos and other information are either scraped from the site or obtained via the API (it varies by site), and aggregated on the Power dashboard. Users can respond/comment on this content directly from Power. And if they like, they can send messages and updates to all of their social networks at once. Or send a message to just one friend, but have it sent to all of their different social networks (and if they are a Power user, to their email, SMS, instant message, etc., per their settings).

If you visit one of the social networks through the Power site, the pages are marked up with additional functionality. Click a button to start chatting with the user over MSN chat, if they are a Power.com user.

Lastly, users can create a Power.com profile based on whatever social network they choose. Here’s mine, based on Facebook (which, by the way, effectively makes my private Facebook profile public).

It’s all a bit confusing, but it’s fairly simple to try out. Just log in and go.

There are real benefits to the service. Users can keep track of friends on social networks they belong to but don’t visit very often. Status messages can be added to all networks simultaneously. Photos and videos can be uploaded on multiple sites at once. And messaging people across multiple services is dead simple.

There are limitations to the service. You have to access the sites via Power.com. And the company is scraping content off the sites, something that may violate the terms and conditions of some or all of these services (Meebo did the same with instant messaging platforms, and was eventually embraced - but they could have just been shut down).

As I said above, the company has gathered 5 million users since August, mostly on Orkut. Power.com users who leave content on sites can choose to add a link to Power.com, making the service spread virally very quickly. Now that they’ve launched publicly and on the big sites, expect the service to grow even more quickly.

The company has raised $5 million in venture financing from Silicon Valley-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve covered a bunch of services that attempt to do some of the things Power.com is doing. See our posts on MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker. None of those sites were able to tap into the viral growth features that Power.com has, though. Power’s decision to add a link when content is posted through their service was brilliant.

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We were doubtful last night when the story first broke. There were just too many oddities to The Times’ tale about a complicated Yahoo/Microsoft search arrangement that would guarantee billions to Yahoo in exchange for a ten year search deal. We’ve checked with our sources - all of them - and we can’t verify a single fact in the story.

The first part of the story: “Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.”

Wrong. Our sources at Microsoft say they are not in current negotiations with Yahoo, over anything. Our sources at Yahoo agree, also saying they are not in negotiations with Microsoft over anything. Yahoo sources add that the company is fully engaged in finding a new CEO right now, and nothing else.

The second part of the story: “The proposal forms the centrepiece of a complex transaction that would see Microsoft support a new management team to take control of Yahoo…Jonathan Miller, ex-chairman and chief executive of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media, have been lined up to lead the new management team.”

Wrong. I spoke with Ross Levinsohn this afternoon. He says that there is absolutely no truth to the story. He also says that neither he or Jonathan Miller, his partner at Velocity Interactive Group, were contacted by the Times.

The third part of the story: “Under the terms of the proposed transaction, Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility to the Miller and Levinsohn management team. The duo would raise an additional $5 billion from external investors. This cash would be used to buy convertible preference shares and warrants which would give it a holding in excess of 30% of Yahoo. The external investors would also have the right to appoint three of Yahoo’s 11 board directors. The talks with Yahoo involve Microsoft obtaining a 10-year operating agreement to manage the search business. It would also receive a two-year call option to buy the search business for $20 billion. That would leave Yahoo to run its own e-mail, messaging, and content services. It is expected that the operating agreement would boost Yahoo’s income by as much as $2 billion per annum.”

Wrong. See above. Also, the deal terms make no sense compared to Microsoft’s actual search offer from earlier this year. It values Yahoo way above market value, even taking deal premiums into account, and the incremental cash flow from the deal doesn’t match up to previous estimates published by Yahoo.

The Times, first published in 1785, has long been considered the newspaper of record in the UK, but yesterday they really stepped in it, and someone has manipulated them badly. Thankfully the markets weren’t open, because the article would have definitely resulted in a short term spike in Yahoo stock.

Thanks to FailBlog for the image, and just in general for existing.

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Today’s the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).

All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site - Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc.) can optionally flow back to the user’s activity stream.

What the third party sites get out of these services: easy sign in for users, particularly new users. They can also use the profile data to help users create accounts at their site with little data input. The activity stream information published on the social networks includes links back to their sites. And one of the most interesting features, for Facebook Connect partners: sites can request friend lists from Facebook to help them make more connections on their own services. Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently gushed over the potential of Facebook Connect for his service.

Facebook also gives Connect partners most of the same tools as their application developers to promote their services via the news feed, invites, etc.

But the real value goes to the social networks. These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services. That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc.

MySpace in particular wants to own user identities. Their MySpace profile is their name online, which is why they’ve embraced OpenID so completely in recent months. Data Availability and OpenID are two parts to a single strategy.

Facebook is probably less concerned with identity - there is no branded URL for users, for example. But they do want to own the definitive profile for an individual and, more importantly, their social graph. Knowing who you are and who your friends are is the key to their yet-unrealized business model.

And the biggest win of all is this free flow of data back to the social networks, which quite nicely fills out a user’s profile for advertising purposes.

Facebook is moving ahead alone with Connect, using proprietary standards for login and data sharing. They’ve also prohibited Google from trying to get in the middle of things with their Friend Connect service. MySpace, by contrast, is using mostly open standards in their approach, and is working closely with Google to make sure the services work properly together.

The battle for partners is intense. MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner, but rumor is that Twitter is actually integrating with Facebook first (there’s no reason they can’t offer both, and they probably will). MySpace also announced Yahoo and eBay as launch partners. To date, though, they’ve only launched with Flixster and Eventful.

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I’m with you on this one Jason. Randall Stross’ article (it’s really an editorial, but not marked as such) rips into Tesla as “not much more than a functioning concept car” and suggests it would be foolish of the government to grant it a loan under a 2007 Federal loan program designed specifically to encourage development of vehicles that conserve fuel.

Stross’ argument is that Tesla only makes cars for the rich (their first model is $109,000), and the technology is unproven. But Tesla has announced two new vehicles, both at much lower prices (and one targeted at $30,000). Stross’ facts are wrong, and his opinions are misguided. If Tesla succeeds, it will be because it was able to sell cars to the mass market.

I’m against government meddling in the markets. But I would far prefer to see Tesla get any part of that money, if it must be distributed, than any of the big three automakers. As I wrote this weekend, the best thing for them, and for our country, is to just let them die. They are incapable of innovating given their current financial and logistical structure. Tesla, on the other hand, is actually doing something interesting.

Love it or hate it, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader is selling well -- in fact, even at $359 there currently aren’t any in stock. So Amazon certainly doesn’t need any advice from me about how to sell more Kindles, but I have some ideas about how the company could make the device more attractive to casual readers like me.

The basic idea would be to make the Kindle reach critical mass as a consumer product, similar to how many “average” people own an iPod. Whether iPod owners use it or appreciate it isn’t as important as the fact that they bought an iPod because it’s become the de facto standard for portable music playback.

Granted, e-book readers are a harder sell than portable music players as almost everyone consumes music in someway or another but not everyone regularly reads books for pleasure. Still, the idea isn’t to make the Kindle as popular as the iPod, it’s to make the Kindle the iPod of e-book readers.

The company behind MyQuire, a simple but pretty powerful online application that lets individuals and team members work on projects in a social network-like environment, has been recently acquired.

That’s about all we know. We got in touch with CEO Michael Dawson but he declined to comment or share any details because the buyer apparently requested full confidentiality on the deal.

A tipster shared the following e-mail he received:

We have some big news! After nearly two years of building MyQuire, we have been acquired. We have had a great time working with you, and couldn’t have gotten here without your help.

As part of this deal, we will no longer be able to operate MyQuire.com. Services on the platform will end January 1, 2009. We apologize for any disruption to your work.

The collaboration tool was first launched about 14 months ago at the DEMOFall conference but we hadn’t really heard anything from or about the company since. Even their own ‘press coverage’ and ‘press releases’ pages haven’t been updated since December 2007.

Anyone out there who knows a bit more about the acquisition?

Here’s a video of Founder and former CEO David Steinberg presenting MyQuire at DEMOFall 07:

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Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker.  His industry went into recession a year ago, so he’s had a little more time than most startup CEOs to think about how to deal with the current downturn. Below is his advice to his fellow entrepreneurs.

Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the job.

We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive. Since real estate crashed before the overall market, Redfin (my online real estate company) has had a year’s head-start sorting out which changes seem to be working for us.

Not that we don’t still have a long ways to go.  We’re still on track for our first profits in 2009, but we’re going to have to fight to make it.

The time we have left to succeed or fail is really just the measure of how long it took to adapt to our downturn. If I had been more experienced, we’d have adapted faster. Here’s the survival guide I’d give my former self, the one just starting to face the storm:

1. Compete With Your Successor

I often think about what my replacement will do after I’m fired. She won’t have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret. She’ll look at everything as an outsider—as a customer—refusing to tolerate problems that have lasted so long I’ve forgotten they’re there, re-considering initiatives we already passed over for want of imagination or energy. And she’ll have nine or even twelve months of leeway to build the business, so she can think long-term. Worst of all, she’ll get credit for turning Redfin into a successful, thriving business. I think, “I hate her! I hate her!” And then I try to be her.

2. Act Like an Owner

You’ve probably spent most of your life hating your boss, pleasing others (so you can blame them later) and spending other people’s money. These are hard habits to break. When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin. My moment of clarity came when a board member said, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re the owner of this business.” And he was right: you won’t own all the proceeds if the company succeeds, but you’ll certainly own a failure in its entirety. This sparked several reptilian impulses:

• “I can’t blame anyone else if this sucker goes down.” This made me feel powerful and savage, like Arnold at the end of “Predator.”
• “If it were all my money, I’d invest it in Redfin today — but there’d be some big changes around here.” We’re making those changes now. (This is about focusing on the part of the business that you really believe in.)
• “If we had to get our wallet out every week for that expense, would we?” (This is about focusing on the part of the business you don’t believe in.)

3. Get a Board You Connect With (Not Just One With Connections)

Startups have so much size anxiety that nothing can stop us from recruiting big shots onto our boards. But first-time CEOs need someone we can talk to about practical details, too. So in our case, Redfin chairman Paul Goodrich recruited Marc Singer for his experience with businesses run out of the cash register: restaurant chains, bean-bag manufacturers, installers of electronic animal fences. I used to be dubious that we had anything to learn from these companies. Not anymore.

Now I catch myself gazing at a parking-lot coffee cart and thinking, “what a great business” (it’s more profitable than most venture-funded startups). Marc has cultivated a nuts-and-bolts, make-money-now execution focus at our company. But there’s another benefit to working with him: it was easier from day one to think out loud with someone I wasn’t so anxious to impress.

Where I’d always imagined my board conversations would be like Richard Gere’s in “Pretty Woman” or even Willem Dafoe’s in “Spiderman” — conversations with Marc were more like telling a guy on a Greyhound bus about a bad breakup, where it all just came pouring out. In tough times, you need a board you connect with more than a board with connections.

4. Run Weekly Revenue Meetings

A job applicant from Amazon suggested holding a weekly revenue meeting, which has been an immediate hit. We focus on what we can do to drive revenue from week to week—tactical stuff, like hiring another field agent or changing a call to action on our site. We catch glitches that could otherwise last all month.

5. Automate Bad News

Bad news travels slowly—or sometimes just sits in your stomach—unless you pump reports straight out to the board, on revenues, traffic, customer service. Add spin if you like, but in a separate note so you don’t hold things up. This helps you avoid the-dog-ate-it board meetings.

6. (Just Ask to) Meet Your Peers

My natural tendency is to avoid meeting people outside of Redfin. I tend to measure my own work in keystrokes, and I begin to miss my computer after I’m away for 30 minutes. In hard times especially, it’s easy for a startup to become like a teenager’s basement bedroom: insular, stale, reeking of dude. Yet there are very few hours that have raised Redfin’s value as much as meetings with other entrepreneurs. A year before our cash-evaporation date, one CEO told me to start raising money. Another told us to get on the stick about our Google search rank. For someone wary of most consultants and experts, these meetings are one of my only sources of new information. And it’s important to gather new information: line managers have to focus on the jobs in front of them, but executives should be awake to what’s happening in the larger world. Anyone will meet you if you just ask for her help.

7. Create Simplicity

When Obama first heard the proposed slogan “yes we can,” his reaction was: “too simple.” But a leader’s job is to create simplicity. Over the past year, our real-estate executives slogged through ambiguous data on conversion rates, close rates, tour fulfillment. Decisive meetings felt like a math test where we ran out of time. Yet it never occurred to me to stop, step back and be precise and insistent about what we needed to know to make a decision. When something is hard to explain, you don’t understand it and you make mistakes. It’s a cliché to “keep it simple, stupid,” but the real challenge is to make it simple, mastering complexity instead of ignoring it. Entrepreneurs instinctively want to speed things up. What’s really hard is knowing when you have to slow them down.

8. Go on the Attack

Your competitors are hurting too. Be the aggressor, not the victim.

9. Be a Roman

What disgusted the ancient Romans about barbarians was their lack of discipline. Oxford Professor Peter Heather writes, “As far as a Roman was concerned, you could easily tell a barbarian by how he reacted to fortune. Give him one little stroke of luck, and he would think he had conquered the world. But, equally, the slightest setback would find him in deepest despair…” This is why, 2,000 miles from home, several hundred Romans could slaughter several thousand barbarians.

Startups are founded by barbarians. But to survive the ups and downs, you have to make yourself into a Roman. The most talented entrepreneur I know nearly self-destructs on the 18-month birthday of each of his ventures. By that point a startup isn’t brand-new anymore, and it isn’t Google either. The closer you get to becoming a real company, the less glamorous reality seems: you’re grimy from clawing for money and breathing hard now from exertion, which would be fine if you could convince yourself you’re not the only one struggling. Everyone struggles. Keep fighting.

10. The Journey is the Destination

Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream. Even though you’re a second-string Little Leaguer, you dream that you’ll find a way into the World Series, that, with the game on the line, you’ll manage to hit just one major-league pitch. And if you do hit it, I promise you won’t be as happy as you were the moment before you swung. If you’re still playing, you can still win. And playing’s the thing. Enjoy it.

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Last year Amazon had trouble filling orders of the then-new Kindle, so eBay took over and prices rocketed to $1,500. This year, same problem. Amazon says orders for Kindles will take 11-13 weeks to fulfill (which is, we believe, when they will launch the Kindle 2). So you aren’t getting one by Christmas directly from Amazon.

But eBay and Amazon stores have them for sale. New ones are going for as much as $975 (some are less) for buy it now. The market price for used ones seems to be in the $700 range, but some one is just $429.

I saw save a few dollars and wait for the new one to come out. You don’t want to be the guy who’s reading the old model on the plane.

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The UK’s Times Online is reporting that “Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.” The report is filled with lots of juicy, specific details that lend it credence, but don’t make a lot of sense when you drill down into them.

The new deal, according to the Times Online, is a complex transaction that involves Microsoft supporting a new management team made up of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and former Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn, who are investing partners at Velocity Interactive Group. Levinsohn, however, tells VentureBeat there is “no truth” to the story. (Although there were rumors a while back that Microsoft wanted Levinsohn and Miller to run Yahoo, which is where this might be coming from).

And unlike Microsoft’s earlier offer to buy Yahoo’s search business outright, this one is for a long-term operating agreement. In fact, the $20 billion deal that sells the story in the headline is a red herring that refers to a call option that is part of the supposed deal. Here is how the story actually describes the supposed terms of the deal:

Under the terms of the proposed transaction, Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility to the Miller and Levinsohn management team. The duo would raise an additional $5 billion from external investors.

This cash would be used to buy convertible preference shares and warrants which would give it a holding in excess of 30% of Yahoo.

The external investors would also have the right to appoint three of Yahoo’s 11 board directors. The talks with Yahoo involve Microsoft obtaining a 10-year operating agreement to manage the search business. It would also receive a two-year call option to buy the search business for $20 billion. That would leave Yahoo to run its own e-mail, messaging, and content services.

It is expected that the operating agreement would boost Yahoo’s income by as much as $2 billion per annum.

So the deal is really that Microsoft would put up $5 billion to help a new management team buy preferred shares and warrants that would give it a 30% stake in Yahoo. In return, Microsoft would get a 10-year operating agreement to run Yahoo’s search business.

Let’s just compare this to the deal Microsoft previously offered to buy Yahoo’s search business outright.

That involved an $8 billion direct investment in Yahoo in exchange for 16% of the company, plus $1 billion in cash for the search business. And that was expected to generate an extra $1 billion in operating income.

So how does the new deal generate twice as much income going into an economic downturn? And why would Microsoft agree to anything other than complete ownership of Yahoo’s search business? And how does the search business go from being worth $1 billion earlier this year to $20 billion in two years?

Like I said, it doesn’t make much sense.

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Everybody these days has some advice for the beleaguered U.S. auto industry. Bail them out. Break up the unions. Do something about the dealerships. Do something about spiraling health care and pension costs. Design cars people will love. Etc.

There’s always the “be more like Apple” advice that’s been going around for a couple of years. Make the iPod of cars. One that people love so much that they’ll pay a premium for it. Robert Scoble handed out pounds of this kind of advice a couple of weeks ago.

But there’s a reason why the car companies can’t build the iPod of cars. It’s because they’re so weighed down with all the logistical nightmares of actually building the stuff that goes into those cars.

Apple doesn’t actually make any of the parts that go in the iPod or iPhone. Factories, mostly in Shenzhen, China, do that. Most of the big PC manufacturers don’t actually build computers or any of the parts that are in them. Every part is made by different companies that specialize in building that particular thing. Even final hardware assembly is outsourced. Dell and some others do some final assembly themselves to allow for easy customization, but they are quickly getting out of that business, too.

If the car companies want to be more like Apple, they need to stop building any actual cars.

Vertical integration kills real research, because every company is doing their own work. With personal computers, every component has a vibrant and competitive market that drives innovation, quality and cost control. The big PC brands just design the final product and outsource the actual building of it.

Every major car manufacturer designs their own engines and drivetrains, manufacturers many of the important parts of the car, assembles it, manages a network of dealers and own their own finance companies to help people pay for those cars. Over the years they’ve dabbled in outsourcing, but the current trend is actually more vertical integration, not less.

Who’s the Intel of engine manufacturers? Why isn’t there one?

The best way forward for the automotive industry is to rip itself apart and start doing things sensibly, like the PC industry does. It won’t make any one company more stable, of course. In fact, it means competition will regularly drive companies at every point in the process out of business. But none of those companies will be in a position to drive our economy south if they do go out of business. Someone better will just take their place.

Does this mean our cars will be built in China? Yeah, it does. There’s no avoiding that. U.S. workers are just paid too much to build cars any more. Detroit may become the center of the car design world, with highly skilled and highly paid workers designing the iPod of cars, but the parts will be built elsewhere, and assembled elsewhere.

There’s a counter argument, that Toyota is the most vertically integrated car company in the world, and also the largest and healthiest. I argue that they’re the only ones that can do it profitably over the medium run in such an inefficient market because they have scale. If the market changes, which it is, that vertical integration model will fail.

And here’s the thing - this kind of change could never happen quickly in a normal market. There are just too many people negatively affected to make it work. But right now, with the auto-makers on the edge of collapse anyway, all we have to do is nothing to make this happen. Let the big car companies fail. Don’t bail them out. Their assets will efficiently move to the highest value use. There’s a good chance that ten years from now we’ll have a whole new crop of U.S. auto companies designing (and overseeing the assembly of) some really awesome cars.

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Bureaucracy kills innovation. We all know that. But why? Partly, it’s because bureaucracy grows out of prudence, a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the past. With the current economic crisis, for example, you can be sure that a lot more checks will be put into place—both in Washington and in corporate boardrooms—to prevent the excesses that got us into this situation from happening again. Governments and corporations alike react to crises by implementing more rules and regulations.

Putting checks in place, after all, is the prudent thing to do. But bureaucracies, and the checks they impose on companies, have their unintended consequences. Paul Graham takes a stab at exploring these costs in a new essay. He writes:

Every check has a cost.

. . . Checks instituted by governments can cripple a country’s whole economy. Up till about 1400, China was richer and more technologically advanced than Europe. One reason Europe pulled ahead was that the Chinese government restricted long trading voyages. So it was left to the Europeans to explore and eventually to dominate the rest of the world, including China.

In more recent times, Sarbanes-Oxley has practically destroyed the US IPO market. That wasn’t the intention of the legislators who wrote it. They just wanted to add a few more checks on public companies. But they forgot to consider the cost. They forgot that companies about to go public are usually rather stretched, and that the weight of a few extra checks that might be easy for General Electric to bear are enough to prevent younger companies from being public at all.

The bureaucracy of large corporations can be just as bad. He gives the examples of checking to make sure suppliers are solvent before allowing them to bid for business or approving large software purchases by committee. On the surface, these are prudent precautions, but they end up imposing costs that also need to be taken into account:

The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn’t waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much.

Checks on purchases will always be expensive, because the harder it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost.

Suppliers, whether they are plastic manufacturers or software vendors, will incorporate the cost of complying with bureaucracy into their price. And it is not just outside vendors that make this calculation. So do employees. Throw too many rules at the employees who create your product and the most talented ones may decide it is not worth their while. Graham gives the example of software programmers frustrated by longer release schedules after their startup has been acquired by a larger company with more rules in place. He warns:

And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won’t even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you’ll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won’t even want to work for you.

This is the cost of prudence. Sometimes it is worth it, sometimes it is not. Releasing software that actually works might be better than releasing early and releasing often, depending on what type of software it is and on your customers’ tolerance for failure. Stronger rules regulating the buying and selling of credit derivatives would have definitely been in the “worth it” category. Imposing Sarbanes-Oxley equally across companies both big and small was overkill.

Rules need to be judged not only by what they are designed to accomplish or protect against, but also by the hidden costs they end up imposing on everyone who follows them.

(Photo by redjar).

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148Apps, which tracks and reviews iPhone Apps, says 10,000 applications have now been released on the iPhone App store (the site is named after the fact that you can add up to 148 applications to an iPhone or iPod touch).

A tribute page shows a mini icon for every application. And it also gives some interesting data. About 24% of apps are free; 35% cost $.99. The average cost is $3.12, including free apps. About 34% are games or entertainment, and there are 49 weather related apps for the iPhone despite the fact that a weather app is built in.

If you’re an iPhone user, tell us the apps you can’t live without in the comments. The ones I use every day: Aqua Hoops, Recorder, SearchMe, iGolf, Google, Zombie (its cathartic), iThread (CrunchBase on the iPhone), and the social networks (Loopt, Facebook, MySpace).

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In case you’ve noticed more notifications from Facebook in the past 24 hours, it’s probably not because you’ve suddenly become more popular. It looks like Facebook’s email notification problem is getting worse.

Facebook lets members turn email notifications on or off for more than 30 different actions on the site. These include anything from when someone sends you a message inside Facebook, invites you to an event, or adds you as friend to when someone tags you in a photo or sends you a poke. Facebook sent out the email below to anyone who is affected:

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

So if you got this e-mail, it means that all of those 30-plus notification settings, including ones for individual apps you’ve installed, are all now set to “On.”

As far as data loss goes, this isn’t that big a deal. The only data that Facebook lost was preference data, not any messages, photos, videos, or the like. But preference data is also important. What if Facebook had lost everyone’s privacy settings instead of just their e-mail notification settings? It would be (slightly) more serious.

The lesson here: Don’t put anything on Facebook you’d hate to lose (or reveal to the world, for that matter).

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The theme this holiday shopping season is frugality. J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan expects online sales to be flat this year. In a survey of U.S. consumers conducted by J.P. Morgan, nearly 30 percent of online shoppers say they plan on spending less this year during the holidays than last year.

Nevertheless, online retailers should do better than offline ones. In total, including offline shoppers, 44 percent say they plan on spending less this year (up from 33 percent who responded the same overall last year). But even among those who plan on reducing their total spending, 19 percent still think their online purchases will be higher.

And while only 12 percent of total shoppers plan on spending more money this year, that number is 32 percent for onine shoppers—slightly more than the number who are cutting back on their online holiday expenditures.

When it comes to online shopping sites, Amazon still rules, but Walmart and Target are catching up. About 50 percent of online shoppers say they will shop this year at Amazon, compared to 35 percent at Walmart.com, 32 percent at eBay, and 27 percent at Target.com. In fact, this year could be the first one where Walmart.com surpasses eBay in total number of online shoppers. The survey also indicates that Sears.com could see a 36 percent increase in shoppers. (Maybe that’s why the site went down today).

Among high income shoppers, however, Amazon is head-and-shoulders above the rest. A full 59 percent of those making more than $100,000 a year shop at Amazon. The nearest competitor in the survey attracts only 33 percent of that income group. No matter what income group respondents fall into, the single most important factor when shopping online is price, followed by selectionand familiarity with the store.

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The debate about Netbooks, which are very small and very cheap laptop devices, is beginning to heat up. The category is only about a year old but sales are expected to top 5 million this year.

Lots of people think Netbooks are the next big volume market because they allow people who previously couldn’t afford computers to own one. People got so bullish on the devices that sales projections reached 50 million units by 2012.

I’ve had a chance to test many of the units, though, and I can say that the promise is much bigger than the payoff. Perhaps that’s why Intel is rethinking whether the devices are as great as everyone’s expectations.

A typical Netbook has a 7 inch screen, an Intel Atom or Via Nano processor, a solid state (flash) hard drive and a keyboard that’s 80-85% standard size. Most have Wifi. Some have other bells and whistles like bluetooth, a camera, etc.

I find Netbooks unusable for three reasons: they’re underpowered as PCs, the screen is too small for web surfing, and the keyboard is so small that effective typing is impossible.

The basic problem as I see it: Netbooks are designed to appeal to two very different markets - the price sensitive and the size sensitive. The two are really mutually exclusive.

Too Little Horsepower

Netbooks use Intel Celeron, Intel Atom, or Via Nano CPUs. All are x86 compatible, and they have great power usage. At best the devices have 1 GB of memory, and some make do with as little as 256 MB.

Most of these machines are running Windows XP or Vista. A few have some flavor of Linux. Combining that UI, even the lower end XP and Linux, with normal computing is a heavy chore for these machines. If you have an email application open and a couple of tabs in a browser, there’s a lot of slow down. One Vista machine I’ve been testing tends to crash after a few minutes of use.

This is not the computing experience that most people are familiar with. The Atom just can’t compare to a dual-core laptop when it comes to performance Anyone with an alternative will quickly be unhappy at how sluggish these machines are.

Then There’s The Screen

These machines have screens ranging from 7 inches on up. The worst thing about the screens is vertical resolution, which is generally 600 pixels. Even if you aren’t using a lot of toolbars and plugins on the browser that take up vertical space, they annoyance factor is high. This is, at best, how much of a web page you’ll see on the screen:

You are constantly scrolling down on these devices. You have to scroll down just to see the title of the first article on the NYTimes, for example. And unlike the iPhone, you can’t just swipe your finger. You have to use the keyboard or trackpad to scroll down, and it means taking your eyes off the screen. It’s annoying and, again, if you have a different device, you are going to stop using your Netbook.

Remember that the iPhone has 480 vertical resolution, and you can resize text to fit a lot of it on the screen. The image above shows 8 lines of text in the post (net of title, etc.). The iPhone shows 22 lines of text.

In other words, the iPhone or iPod Touch, with a tiny 3.5 inch screen, has a vastly better browsing experience than any Netbook (it’s faster too).

The Keyboard

Then there’s the keyboard. It’s tiny - most of them are just 80% of regular size. Any normal adult can’t type fast on it without constantly hitting the wrong keys because there is no space between them. It isn’t much better than a Blackberry-type mobile keyboard when it comes to speed and accuracy of input.

Convergence Of Mobile And Laptop

There is a big fat hole in the market between mobile devices like the iPhone and regular laptops. But smaller, underpowered laptops aren’t the answer for the mass market. Most of the Netbooks aren’t much cheaper than very low end laptops (and those laptops have normal keyboard and much bigger screens).

The problem with Netbooks is they are trying to address two markets at once: emerging markets where price is very important, and developed markets where people want a second computer. The emerging markets don’t care about size, they just want it at a low cost - so offer them something that’s bigger and works better at the same price (remember, bigger = cheaper for most computer parts except the screen). Developed markets don’t care about price as much as performance, and Netbooks cut too many corners. Perhaps that’s why Netbook screens are starting to inch up to 10 and 11 inches. Which doesn’t really make them much different from normal laptops (and the prices are about the same).

So what’s the answer? Well, we have our own ideas. When you ditch the operating system and all it’s weight and focus on a device that runs a browser only (a true netbook), you can make do with mobile phone level hardware. Give people a big screen to really experience the Internet. Make it a touch screen or add a normal keyboard. And keep it really inexpensive. That’s a device people will want.

The sub notebooks can get bigger and more useful without sacrificing cost, which is great for emerging markets and students. Tiny notebooks that perform well will be higher cost, and there’s a market for those, too.

Update: There has been a fair amount of criticism of this post. Instead of doing a follow up, I’m copying a comment I left at one blog post that says I didn’t research properly:

I should have been clearer in my post for those people, like you, who really know the space. I’ve tested a ton of these, and I have definitely done my research.. They litter my office. A lot of them are older 7 inch models. I have a Nano device that I guess hasn’t hit the market yet, running vista. not so well. I’ve got one of the Dells. I’ve tested 10 inch, 8.9 inch and 7 inch machines on every OS they offer (XP, Vista, Linux). I’ve even scraped machines and put my own stripped down version of linux with a browser…

and that’s when things start humming. The screen still sucks, and the keyboard still sucks, but the machine works well. as in as well as a desktop, at browsing the internet.

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